For Luca Guadagnino After the huntmany of the film’s entire scenes take place in Alma’s spacious apartment. Decorator Stefano Baisi’s job was to design the apartment in a way that fit the aesthetic of the educated elite, while also bringing a sense of history to the story.
Baisi says it was important to bring a generational history to the apartment in the design, with influences not only from Alma and her husband Frederik, but also from Frederik’s parents and grandparents. While instilling a sense of history, it was also essential to create a home that would match the style of an apartment found in the upper echelons of New Haven society.
Amazon MGM Studios/courtesy Everett Collection
DEADLINE: What were your inspirations for the apartment?
STEFANO BAISI: In the first draft, the apartment was described as a brownstone house which is very common architecture in this part of the United States, so it was consistent with what you might find in New Haven. Then Luca thought that to represent this kind of academic elite world and to bring to life all the actions that the characters had to do in that space, it was more effective and more powerful to have a horizontal space instead of a vertical space like the brownstone houses are. So we started thinking about the apartment on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side in New York, which has been filmed many times in many films and could be a good environment. We started thinking about the Langham Building and the Dakota Building as main references for the apartment.
DEADLINE: What about interior design?
AWFUL: We wanted to give depth to the characters and we started to wonder, who was Frederik? Who was Alma before she was the characters in the film? Frederik probably inherited the apartment from his parents, and before his grandparents’ parents, so we started thinking about creating three layers of history in the apartment, starting with the grandparents who fled Europe to the United States, bringing in the architectural styles of the time like Bauhaus to create the first layer of history. Then we thought about the parents who lived through the Kennedy era in the United States and we collected many of the interiors of Jacqueline Kennedy’s apartments to start creating this second layer of history. Then we brought Frederik and Alma’s life into the apartment. They traveled widely, they collected art from North Africa and many places around the world.
